Into the Half-Life from Donald Weber on Vimeo.

“Uranium is the mineral of Apocalypse. It is a fearsome animal caged in this exotic metal. Hot as the sun, but one whose instabilities could be accurately charted and precisely aimed.” – Tom Zoellner

Zholtye Vody, Ukraine, not only mined uranium but also enriched it to be used in weapons of mass destruction. Of a current population of 60,000, no less than 45,000 residents are listed on hospital records as sick from various radiation-related illnesses.

See Don’s photo essay on Zholtye Vody for The Walrus here.

Artyom Kolinko, 24, has muscular dystrophy. At 14, he was fine, a year later he lost nearly half his body weight. His mother believes Artyom contracted the disease after it was discovered their house contained a high level of radiation. Since neutralized, the family still lives in the house. Although his family is fairly well off, many children with similar conditions “and with no means, simply die off,” stated Artyom’s mother. In a banya – Russian sauna – where Artyom goes to soothe his limbs on a weekly basis.

Chernobyl Stalker from Donald Weber on Vimeo.

The people most affected by the explosion of Reactor Number Four on the morning of April 26,1986, soon learned that the event known as Chernobyl was predicted by a feature film made seven years earlier. Stalker, by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, explored the limits of our technical power against the backdrop of a mysterious force that can only be approached on foot, by forest “stalkers” who have learned to accept its risky gifts.

Today, real stalkers live inside Chernobyl’s official 30-kilometre Exclusion Zone and secretly strip the dead city of its valuables.

This short film by Donald Weber documents their twilight existence as scavengers of our newest Lost Civilization. Our grand technical vision, the city as pure laboratory, quickly recedes into the hunting and gathering primitivism of a future stone age.

See Donald Weber’s Stalker photo essay.

“Omigod, that is a freaking grenade. Holy fuck – explosion! Excuse my language here on the air.” That was Corrine McDermid narrating blurry but revealing live footage of a face-off between police and protesters at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, in September 2008. Police with smoke bombs, pepper spray, tear gas and protective gear had come to a head with activists. The activists advanced and cat-called the barricade of police who, like silent black-clad action figures, fired clouds of coloured smoke into the crowd, chasing the people farther and farther from the convention hall.

Corrine McDermid was one of a group of passionate volunteers armed with camcorders and cell phones to document the conflict for what was then a new non-profit media start-up called the Uptake. Footage fed to the Uptake’s command central was streamed over the Internet; even if the reporters were arrested or had their equipment confiscated, the dramatic, unvarnished stories would reach the world. The Uptake had, unlike other media organizations, predicted how action-packed the demonstrations outside the RNC would be, so it was ready with trained volunteers on the ground to tape the dramatic events unfold in real-time, expletives in all. “When things started happening on streets, which no one fully expected, we were ready to go live with it,” the Uptake’s founder and executive director Jason Barnett later said. The Uptake was founded because, as executive director Jason Barnett explained later, there was an opportunity to provide footage that no one else would have.

It was citizen journalism at its newest and rawest – a classic example of a nimble group of camera-wielding documentarians infiltrating areas traditional media either couldn’t access or didn’t have the resources to cover. But the Uptake was more than just gathering and training ad hoc journalists and media-savvy youth. Its triumph at the RNC was a preview of how rapid response coverage of major events is dramatically changing how stories are covered and who is covering them.

Those were early days, when the role of citizen journalists was fairly straightforward: buy cameras and cell phones, give them to a bunch of eager, hyper-connected, mostly young volunteers and see what they gather. Over the 16 months since Corrine McDermid’s coverage of the RNC showdown, the Uptake has evolved to become a much more complex model of a new media structure, one where the divisions between legacy media, social media, Twitter, traditional reporting and civic society has pretty much been obliterated. The Uptake also represents how diverse multi-platform groups are redefining relationships between traditional news, citizen journalist groups and a more nebulous, broader and influential group of what you might call activist-journalists.

*

To witness the new relationships between magazines, bloggers, activists, advocacy non-profit groups and outfits like the Uptake, fast forward to December 2009 in Copenhagen for an even bigger media event than the Republican National Convention: COP15, the United Nations climate change talks. Climate change issues gathered steam throughout 2009 and COP15 turned into one of the biggest international political stories of the year. For 10 days, an estimated 3,000 accredited media and countless numbers of unaccredited bloggers and NGO delegates gathered to report on high-stakes negotiations within Copenhagen’s sprawling Bella Center – not to mention the escalating action on city streets.

The alliances that formed between NGOs and citizen journalist groups like the Uptake, not to mention publications such as the Nation, Grist and Mother Jones, reveal how journalists are working with the groups they once reported on. These partnerships are as intertwined and intricate as a circuit board on the UN-issued Sony Ericsson phones so many of the press and delegates loaned for the 10 days in Denmark. The Uptake, for instance, is part U.S.-based The Media Consortium, a coalition of members that include Salon, Mother Jones and the Nation.

Such alliances are mutually beneficial. News outlets don’t have the resources they once did, especially for international and investigative reporting. Then there are independent journalists who find themselves as lone correspondents with no editorial backup or multimedia support. NGOs, meanwhile, have the mass mobilization to spread large amounts of information quickly.

The Uptake, which received a third of its proposed non-profit funding for the story, could only send four people to Copenhagen: its executive director, executive producer, a writer-turned-impromptu videographer and a one-time CBS reporter now working at a public relations firm. When it came to COP15, “the idea was to go in with a unified voice with traditional media,” says the Uptake’s Barnett.

Other media groups faced similar financial challenges and many sent only one reporter or no reporters, relying instead on delegates who were attending for other reasons – for instance, with advocacy groups like Tcktcktck and 350.org (the latter fronted by journalist-turned-activist Bill McKibben). The establishment – Reuters, BBC and Agence France-Presse, for starters – might have been cloistered in rented white offices at the Bella Center, but plenty of others such as the Nation, Grist, Mother Jones, Guardian columnist and No Logo author Naomi Klein, shared resources with both the Uptake and the very NGOs they were covering. The Uptake provided video footage both to Tcktcktck and Klein, offering tech support to the former and reporting resources to the latter, while posting footage from a high-profile figure (Klein) with other high-profile figures (such as the head of Greenpeace International and Nigerian poet and activist Nnimmo Bassey) on its own site.

“Traditional approaches and tools are becoming obsolete and the interaction between reporters and their audiences has become both more dynamic and more perplexing,” Ivor Shapiro, a professor at the Ryerson School of Journalism, in Toronto, wrote in an editorial for the Canadian Journalism Project. “Verification, that so-called ‘essence’ of journalism, sometimes seems to have morphed from a standard to a question. Conventions surrounding social media and crowdsourcing are in flux, and the relationships between payers and pipers may be wild-westishly chaotic for a while to come.”

Roles also shifted with individuals. A contributing editor and blogger for Good, for instance, divided his time between blogging for the magazine’s website and working as a campaigner for Adopt-a-Negotiator, a youth-driven group that sent international youth to bird-dog government negotiators in attempts to influence environmental policy. Richard Graves, a 20-something television producer who founded the Fired Up Media and Project Survival Media, a citizen journalist program that trains environmental campaigners around the globe to tell local stories of climate change, was hired by NGO Tcktcktck to lead its media offerings (his official title is blogger and online campaigner). Working 18-hour days and looking exhausted by day three of the 10-day convention, Graves wore his activist hat (a term he dislikes) to cross-post Tcktcktck pieces on Huffington Post. Then, switching to his journalist cap, he wrote a feature on for Grist. When he got back to his home in Washington, he said he would go through all the images and footage gathered as part of his Tcktcktck gig and tease out of it an episode of Link TV’s online series Earth Focus.

*

By now, you might wish you had a degree in cartography to map the connections between these journalists and campaigners. But there is, in fact, a geographic center to the activist-journalist relationships formed in downtown Copenhagen. In mid December, that geographic center could be found in the Huset, an expansive bunker-style café that Tcktcktck commandeered during COP15 as a home for independent media and bloggers who didn’t have official press accreditation to the convention center or who simply need a wired, collaborative workspace. (NGO delegates could access the convention center, but they couldn’t get inside the media center like Reuters, the New York Times and other print and broadcast groups.) Dubbed the Fresh Air Center, organizers described it as a “rapid response digital media hub.”

Outfitted with a few desktop computers and dozens of electrical outlets, it quickly became command-central for hundreds of bloggers whose scattered sticker-plastered MacBooks and camera gear across workstations and café tables. An enormous flat-screen TV near the bar streamed live footage – courtesy of the Uptake – from the very convention center that many bloggers couldn’t access. Every night at 7 p.m., Tcktcktck hosted live events (sponsored by the UN Foundation), including a talk with Amy Goodman of the daily radio-TV show Democracy Now! Correspondents spoke by Skype with colleagues back home, photographers uploaded hundred of images from demonstrations, press conferences and other events and bloggers typed madly in multitudes of languages.

One night, Graves wandered around stiff and semi-catatonic after spending 14 hours with a three-person team editing thousands of images from a 10,000-plus person march from the parliament to the Bella Center. Boxes from I Love Pizza were haphazardly stacked on the tables and half-empty pints of beer were propped next to laptops. “It was created for people who wanted to get involved, who care about the issue, but are sometimes locked out of process,” Graves said. “You need professional accreditation from NGO even to get in door [at COP15]. We wanted to give a way for independent journalists who might not be recognized by UN, which has incredibly stringent rules for online journalists. This is too important an issue to be kept out of public site.”

*

To get a sense of the scope of coverage and the strange, intertwined relationships, you had to cover not only the official negotiations, but also the action in the streets. Naomi Klein had predicted that COP15 would be the Seattle of its generation, as contentious as the WTO protests in 1999. In Copenhagen, the Uptake was ready with its small team to watch the scene unfold. On a crisp Saturday afternoon, the Uptake’s Jacob Wheeler and Rick Fuentes walked alongside a mostly peacefully stream of demonstrators. The Politi – reportedly half of the total police force in Denmark – followed in step. Conspicuous among the crowd were the hundreds of ad hoc reporters with serious-looking digital SLRs slung around their necks.

After pushing through the thousands of people packed into the main square, Wheeler and Fuentes emerged at the head of the march. Tiny Canon high-def camera and microphone in his ungloved hands, Wheeler was cheerfully ready for anything. Though he’s a professional writer, his camera duties were new (the Uptake program mentors amateur reporters, but funding restrictions meant they couldn’t bring citizen journalists along. Wheeler, who lived in Denmark, offered an informed perspective to the street coverage). “When I write I have to be specific,” he said. “Today I’m not being specific. I just want a panoramic of what’s happening.” Like everyone else, he was hoping to get shots that would drive people to the Uptake’s website.

Groups of marchers filtered by, many in matching costumes like a four or five guys dressed in oversized white onesies and sagging diapers. There were people in polar bear hoods and others in T-shirts promoting their causes pulled over winter coats. A large contingent of indigenous groups led the pack. Many in the crowd carried signs with slogans such as “There is no Planet B” and “Nature Doesn’t Compromise.” Wheeler caught it all on tape, sometimes running up to interview people, other times panning the crowd. He didn’t have to edit it into a cohesive narrative; that wasn’t the point. He was mainly there to roll tape, let the crowd speak.

A couple hours into the march, Wheeler passed a woman with bleached blond hair, pink tights and a bouquet of fake flowers cruising along on roller-skates just ahead of a police van at the front of the crowd. She turned out to be a kind of citizen journalist herself, producing video footage for her “TV station,” which turned out to be a channel on YouTube that she created with her boyfriend. Fascinated, Wheeler shot several minutes of tape as the woman spoke in English mixed with Spanish and Danish about covering refugee camps. “Those are nice flowers,” he told her at one point. The woman smiled and showed a microphone hidden in the bouquet. “That was great!” he said after breaking away.

Wheeler checked in with Barnett by cell phone throughout the afternoon. Earlier, his partner Fuentes had “disengaged” and headed back to a rented apartment to upload footage from the first few hours. Wheeler kept going. On one call, Barnett passed on a lead from Twitter that Danish model-turned-photographer Helena Christensen was at the front of the march. Wheeler asked a few Danes directing foot traffic, but they didn’t know where Christensen might be. Queries with a local TV crew didn’t turn up anything, either. An interview would have been a small coup for he day, possibly driving more people to the site – where they’d discover other, deeper stories, such as Klein’s interview with Nnimmo Bassey. But it didn’t matter. When Wheeler finished the night, not far from the convention center where climate change negotiators were sequestered, he had hours of footage of an event that was dominating world media. He’d go back, upload the footage for all the media partners – Mother Jones, the Nation, Tcktcktck – to access and filter into the networks buzzing throughout the city and beyond.

Craille Maguire Gillies reports from the recent Resilient Cities confab in Vancouver.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been hanging around environmentalists, urban planners, academics and other “change agents” lately, but the phrase “effect change” — often followed by a nebulous but inspiring call to action — seems to be on the tips of everyone’s tongues.

“We in this room have our hands on the levers to effect change,” Rob Abbott told the 600-odd ecological economists, environmentalists, urban planners, academics, politicians and the like who gathered recently at the Gaining Ground/Resilient Cities conference in Vancouver. Abbott, the moderator and official morale booster, continued: “We are a hinge point in history” and we need to “fully embrace the hands of transformation.”

Everyone in the audience was eager to embrace the hands of transformation. We congregated like ecological worshippers under the green-roofed chapel of the Vancouver Convention Centre, with the shipyards extending east like industrial props in an Edward Burtynsky photograph and the Coastal Mountains visible from across Burrard Inlet. We were ready to be inspired. We were ready to effect change!

Abbott introduced Gregor Robertson, the folksy, handsome mayor of Vancouver — a would-be Barack Obama of municipal politics in a city that is, like the U.S., looking to have its faith in itself restored. (His 2008 election campaign was called Change Everything.) Robertson was an organic farmer who started the fruit smoothie company Happy Planet. In any other city, he might make an unlikely candidate for mayor. Not in Vancouver.

He had come to Resilient Cities to preview his Action Plan 2020, an attempt to make Vancouver the greenest in North America within a decade. The plan proposes to:

- create 20,000 green jobs
- reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 33 percent from 2007 levels (something British Columbia as a whole has instituted)
- make all new construction carbon neutral
- start curbside compost pick-up
- reduce the carbon footprint of food production

When Robertson mentioned expanding Vancouver’s urban forest, applause rippled through the audience. “I don’t think every part of the city is going to be like Stanley Park, but you know what I mean,” he said.

Once a city’s cultural aspirations manifested in high-profile architectural masterpieces; now they aim to be beacons of ecological integrity. On the West Coast, there is a kind of competitive environmentalism between Portland and Vancouver. It’s a friendly contest though: Portland plans to be “the most resilient city”, while Vancouver aims for the title “greenest.” Robertson met later that day with Portland’s mayor, Sam Adams, and a delegation of a dozen or so to talk about, among other things, a high-speed rail line between the two cities. In his speech at Resilient Cities, he described Vancouver’s 2020 plan as a 10-year decathlon.

The rhetoric at such events can seem as artificial as astro turf, trafficking in ambitious, wide-ranging goals but achieving little action. Cities are, however, the places where signs of climate change will be most tangible to the average westerner, where a country’s “resilience” or lack thereof will be most apparent. Cities will be the interpreters, the worker bees and, in many cases, the leaders of the climate change policies that trickle out of international political get-togethers like COP15 in Copenhagen next month. But maybe they are also signs of the emotional, as well as political, state of a place.

Robertson was off the next day to fly to Greece, where, along with B.C. premier Gordon Campbell, he would attend the lighting of the Olympic torch, a symbol of the city’s other great aspiration.

(Photo: Etica e Coragem/Ethics and Courage, Cf.)

As I finish up my work in Manaus and thereabouts, some last thoughts on current flashpoints of conflict, the resolution of which may point the way to the Amazon’s future—for better or worse.

In an area this vast, there, of course, are many disputes simmering at once: the drug-running that bedevils badly-policed border areas, ensnaring indigenous people into their economies, such as at the tri-border frontier (Brazil-Colombia-Peru) around Tabatinga in the west; the soy distribution terminal built by multinational Cargill in Santarém that environmentalists argue will induce even greater destruction in the state of Para as more rainforest is cleared in favour of soy plantations (Greenpeace has pursued an injunction to halt operations at the terminal).

But the two that were most talked about during my stay were the ongoing legal battle to recognize a demarcated territory for the indigenous people at Raposa Serra do Sol in Roraima, adjacent to the border with Venezuela, and the rehabilitation of an old highway project that would connect Manaus with the rest of the country.

Raposa Serra do Sol was declared an indigenous reserve by former president Henrique Cardoso in 1998, but the necessary legislation wasn’t signed into law until Lula did so in 2005. The demarcation would force several major rice growing operations to leave the territory, but they’ve fought tooth and nail to resist their eviction despite provisions of compensation. There have been some violent episodes over the years between the politically-connected agri-businesses and Indians; while a Supreme Court challenge on behalf of the farmers was in the works, the general who commands the Brazilian army unit in Amazonia attacked the government’s Indian policy, suggesting he would refuse to order his troops remove the farmers if required to do so.

A couple weeks ago the Supreme Court upheld the demarcation and the farmers have run out of legal options. Many feared further violence, but according to one source who was just in the area, the plantation owners appear to be backing down; they’re negotiating with Indian leaders for an additional month to shut operations, and in some instances selling their equipment locally.

If the situation does wind down peacefully, it could be landmark moment. Brazil has a habit of passing laws and constitutional resolutions it has little ability, or sometimes enthusiasm, to enforce. Paulo Adario, director of the Greenpeace office in Manaus, joked to me that, “Brazil loves to have the biggest constitution in the world, but when it comes to enforcement or enactment there is no one to fucking do it.” There are several tribes awaiting resolution of demarcation disputes and the redistribution of land they invariably require. The Supreme Court ruling may finally bring some nascent semblance of law and order, and respect for Indian land claims, to the region.

The other development, the highway project, actually brought Lula to Manaus while I was there. The capital of Amazonas state is presently connected to the rest of the country only by river or air. In the 1970s the military government embarked on a series of grand highway building projects in Amazonia, among them the BR-319 linking Manaus with Porto Velho, about 800 kilometres to the south (from Porto Velho you can drive to Cuiabá, Brasilia and the rest of southern Brazil). But the highway was little used and the forest, as is its want, eventually took it back.

Most regular people in Manaus I surveyed were unreservedly in favour of the road, arguing it would make it easier for them to visit family in the south and leverage more development in the area. Adario at Greenpeace, along with other environmentalists, insist the road would have marginal economic impact (a point backed up by several studies) while opening up what remains one of Amazonia’s last pristine quadrants to logging and ranching. Of the six states considered part of the larger Amazon basin, Amazonas is the least deforested at about 3 percent (Para is as much as forty percent deforested according to some estimates). Adario points to Para state and the highway that runs south from Sanatarem to Cuiabá. On either side of that highway, for fifteen miles inland, the forest is mostly gone. He expects the same to happen should the BR-319 get the go-ahead.

Halting the BR-319 may be a losing battle. There’s a lot of popular support, and the revitalization of the highway is a pet project of Lula’s Minister of Transportation, who is from here and has ambitions to run for governor of Amazonas. Making the road happen would give him something to campaign on.

If there’s one thing I’ll miss about Manaus and Amazônia, it’s the fish—the best fresh water peixe I’ve enjoyed anywhere. Generally fatty but not rich, served lightly fried with little fuss with or sauces (a little lime or hot sauce suffices), they come in tastily exotic names like pirarucu, tambaqui, filhote. My favourite joint was a stall run by two busy ladies at the docks across from the wholesale food distribution market. Shipmen and dockworkers bench themselves here for overflowing plates of pirarucu, rice and beans, and salsa for about 5 Reais a pop ($3 CAD). I went almost everyday, sometimes treated by locals to bottles of guarana (a local fizzy pop derived from a berry with caffeine-like properties) just for showing up.

(Photo: Cf.)

Our boat floats up to Abrozinho’s dock, past a drowned tree, fútbol goal posts part-submerged, and a water-logged canoe. This is not uncharacteristic for the rainy season, as many ribeirinhos (river people) of Amazonia tend to settle on or near alluvial floodplains (várzea), living in floating houses, or, like Abrozinho, shanties erected on wood pilings, knowing that part of their land will be underwater between April and June. Here, the fishing and turtle hunting is sweetest, and the prospects are good for harvesting palm fruit and Brazil nut, or tapping nearby clusters of rubber trees.

Ribeirinhos are the most visible of Amazonia’s forest peoples, skilled backwoodsmen and ingenious cultivators who possess the sort of esoteric local knowledge derived from generations of living at the interstitial space between river and forest. Most are detribalized indigenous people or mestizos, working the land in isolation for their own use.

Abrozinho, an impish fellow with absurdly large toes I imagine clinging monkey-like to the brim of his canoe, leaves a half-eaten fish lunch to welcome us. I’m travelling with field workers from Fundaçao Amazonas Sustentável, visiting small river communities on tributaries of the Rio Negro within a two to three hour boat ride of Manaus. FAS administers the Bolsa Floresta program on behalf of the Amazonas state government—a two-year-old initiative that pays forest families directly up to $50 a month not to deforest.

This river man is not shy. I expected him, and the other ribeirinhos I met, to be somewhat retiring and suspect of visitors with their cameras and questions (the field workers were documenting the trip), but they were all instantly gregarious, generous to offer whatever they had to eat, and eager to talk our ears off—the case, I guess, of the lonely, isolated bloke in the sticks, happy to have anyone new around to gossip with, or gab about whatever he’s been up to.

Abrozinho, for example, talks about hunting, and then, switching gears, gives a more detailed than required account of his romantic life outside his otherwise happy marriage—a necessity of the travelling river man’s life I think he explains. He fetches a spiral-bound notebook in which he has recorded the first names of all twenty-three women he’s been with and reads them aloud to us in his soft, slightly slurred, melodious Portuguese. There’s something suggestively poetic to his recitation, each name containing a story, another human episode somewhere in the vastness of Amazonia.

After that, he retrieves a stick of wood and describes the medicinal merits of its bark and sap. Its sap, radiating in blood-red concentric circles inside the wood, is used topically to mend wounds. The bark, steeped in hot water and drank as a tea, could treat an array of nagging ailments. It is also, he says, the river man’s Viagra. Hearing this, I neglect to ask whether the list of names he read out to us is thus unfinished.

I have a thing for frogs. It’s not an affection I’ve spent much time analyzing, nor can I claim to be an expert on amphibians or even well-informed. I do know that their extremely thin and porous skin makes them acutely sensitive to changes in environment (often triggered by climate change or pollution) making them something of a bellwether species as far as tracking the impact of humans on the natural world. Other than that, I’ve dumbly restricted my appreciation of frogs to the level of observational enthusiasm.

As such, the one regret I have for leaving Canada now is the onset of spring, and with it, frog spawning season. Near my parents’ place in the Kawarthas there’s a forested area downhill from an abandoned farm that floods this time of year with run-off and melt water, turning into a northern replica of a Lousiana bayou (minus the gators and pots of jambalaya). It’s a perfect breeding ground—I’ve spent many hours there every spring just meditating on the orgiastic chorus of mating calls bouncing hither and yon, an oscillating, neverending poem of harmonic pulses. You can hear it day and night, and from several hundred metres away. [Here's a snippet from a recording I made once, sadly without external mic. Best listened to with headphones.]

As a happy coincidence, I was reading one of George Orwell’s collections of essays while on the flight to Manaus yesterday, and came across a wonderful piece: “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad”. He begins with the arrival of spring, when the toad emerges from his hole, writing “after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent.” Orwell gets to the mating soon enough:

For a few days after getting into the water the toad concentrates on building up his strength by eating small insects. Presently he has swollen to his normal size again, and then he goes through a phase of intense sexiness. All he knows, at least if he is a male toad, is that he wants to get his arms around something, and if you offer him a stick, or even your finger, he will cling to it with surprising strength and take a long time to discover that it is not a female toad.

Orwell is remembered today for an intense seriousness—as opposed to an intense sexiness—but he wrote smartly on an array of subjects. In his time, he was derided on occasion for columns written in leftist partisan newspapers and journals that were judged frivolous. In his “Toad” essay he answers the charge in part:

How many a time have I stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can’t. So long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, spring is still spring… the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.

Crises be damned, spring is to be savoured.

Demographers have been avidly waiting for this moment—when a majority of the human species had finally traded in its farm implements for pocket protectors, its grubby overalls for fine slacks. According to the United Nations, May 23, 2007, marked the day when the earth’s population became predominantly urban. (This is really a “polite statistical fiction” as one writer described it, based on U.N. estimates of the rate of rural to urban migration worldwide.)

Most of the developing world’s rural poor, however, are merely trading one kind of poverty for another, joining the ranks of those scratching out a living on the city’s margins. Finding shelter in the peri-urban shantytowns and labouring in its informal economies. This mass migration to the cities is dramatically transforming the planet, but it is hardly talked about enough. It’s become an old story. Rio’s favelas are now a tourist attraction.

The community that has taken root around the Guatemala City municipal dump (picture above) is but one example of this global phenomenon. For over sixty years, Central America’s largest, most toxic landfill site, has drawn a steady influx of poor, displaced families that depend on the dump’s derelict bounty for their livelihood. It’s estimated that around 2,000 families work as pickers, most of them residing in the warren of jury-rigged shanty homes across the road from the dump’s entrance. Many of them were driven here during the civil war, fleeing warfare in the highlands.

The best place to acquire a broad mise-en-scène of the dump is from the city’s oldest cemetery. Driving past grand old colonial-style tombs and the ostentatious Mayan-cum-Egyptian temple that serves as the mausoleum for the founder of the country’s largest brewery, there’s rarely-visited corner of the cemetery inhabited by swarms of turkey vultures. From here the resting places of the city’s rich are only a small ravine away from the Brueghelian madness of the landfill.

Dump trucks, shadowed by expectant gangs of pickers, pull into clearings and eject their stash. The piles are swarmed over. The guajeros, keenly aware of the economic hierarchy of trash, generally know when which trucks arrive from what part of the city. Metals are highly prized (from aluminum cans to the scrap from appliances), but almost everything can have a value, from cardboard and bottles to nylon and plastic. Pickers typically earn between $2-$6 a day.

Tractors pile the leftover leftovers into terraces of dirt and multi-coloured refuse. Smouldering fires stinking of burning plastic, randomly arranged, send dark smoke signals into the bleached noon-day sky.

Until recently many of the children worked in this swamp of detritus alongside their parents. I spoke to a bright, fourteen-year-old girl named Olivia who used to pick alongside her mother (mom still works at the dump everyday); she now attends school and is enrolled in an inspiring support program called Camino Seguro.

“Before, when they let kids inside, I had to go with my mom to help. You have to be really careful where you step and I knew that as a child maybe you were risking your life there… My mom still collects plastic, nylon, aluminum, cardboard. I’m not embarrassed to say that because she works very hard and even though she doesn’t have a degree or a regular job, she’s struggling to help us.

Nothing bad has ever happened to us but our neighbour died once because a truck collapsed into the ground (the land is highly unstable) and took her with it. She was buried. They couldn’t even find her. My mom was at the dump at the time, near there, and I heard there was an accident so I was really scared. Everybody was talking about it in the neighborhood. The police wouldn’t let me go in to find my mother so I jumped the fence to go and see if she was okay. The police saw me and took me out again. But nothing had happened to my mother.”

I later spoke with a Dutch social worker who is involved with Camino Seguro and counsels many of the neighborhood’s children.

“The problems our kids cope with, they have a lot problems with anger management, they see a lot of violence in their neighborhood, they see a lot of violence between men and women. So they copy that. Besides there’s no time or skills to talk about emotions, empathy. People are surviving, they go every single day to that garbage dump and they fight to have a good piece of garbage, that’s the reality in that neighborhood. No, you’re not going to sit down and grieve about the husband who left you or the child who died, so it just goes on and on.”

The explosion in the world’s shadow cities is no great secret. Economists, politicians and NGOs have been examining a variety of measures for decades, but each shantytown appears to work according to its own internal logic. It has been proposed that these urban poor be given title to their land, thus providing them with collateral for loans—this is what Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto means when he talks of “liberating dead capital.” But as I’m finding in my research shantytowns are now so well-established in many cities they require a raft of uniquely local solutions. Titling may work in Lima, but that doesn’t mean it will in Istanbul or Mumbai.

And neither is it the magic bullet its proponents often suggest.

Look here for a great photo essay on the Guate City dump by American photographer Misty Keasler.